Recent reviews by Oahkery

So I will recommend this game, because it was, for the most part, clever and fun and unique. But I don't really understand a lot of the praise I had heard before playing this and that I see in the reviews, about how it's this perfect game, the best puzzle game ever, etc., etc. It's fun, but it honestly falls apart a bit in the last half or third of the game, with the fun and interesting parts (working to slowly piece together a language through logic and inference, exploring the tower to find out the history and current state of this weird world, etc.) replaced with some tedious running around. The final language you don't even have to figure out yourself, you just get it told to you, basically. So I was disappointed when I got to the final area expecting another hour or two of language puzzles only to have the entire language completed in the journal almost immediately by just walking around the pretty small area. And the whole game was a little short, with me being completely done in 7 hours, using no outside help except for one or two hints when, in my opinion, it just wasn't clear what the puzzle was actually asking for, rather than me not understanding how to solve the puzzle. I got it on sale, so I'm glad I didn't pay $20 for such a short game.

But enough of the bad. When the game is good, it's really good. If you like logic puzzles and exploration games, you'll almost certainly enjoy this. At times the game can give away a little too much, but for the most part it's a good difficulty curve, starting with a simple language and ramping up to more difficult and complicated ones as you progress. It feels good to have a bunch of unknown words in your journal and then figure out one and suddenly have a cascade of understanding as different pieces slide into place. It's satisfying.

Anyway, overall, it's worth a play, but I'd definitely buy it on sale due to the length and the sort of disappointing end game. But the first 2/3s or so is great.

I'm going to rate this positive, but with caveats. It's just your basic Picross game, which is what I wanted, but there were a few negative things.

The first and largest was that if you leave on the option for it to grey out completed clues, which is a standard option for these types of games, it actually bases whether the clue gets greyed out or not on whether you have the correct squares marked, not simply if you have the same number of squares marked as the clue says. As an example, since that's hard to describe, if you had a row with 10 squares and a clue that said 3, it wouldn't grey it out if you randomly filled in 3 squares in a row. It would only grey it out if you filled in the actual correct 3 squares. Even if you have no other squares filled in on the board, it will grey out the clue even though there's no logical way you could have deduced those squares yet. So it gives you information about the puzzle instead of just being the simple quality of life feature that it should be. It should grey out clues just so you're not having to constantly double check and recount your filled in squares, not to check whether you have something correct or not. So it was frustrating that I either had to get clues for the puzzle or go without that virtually essential feature that I'm used to from every other Pircross video game.

A couple other negatives were that it didn't fill in the 0 rows with X's automatically, that the puzzles never got particularly hard and that it was pretty short. It took me less then three and a half hours to finish all the puzzles, when I'm used to sinking 10s of hours into Picross games since it's pretty easy to make more puzzles. One thing you can do, though, is generate a random 5x5, 10x10 or 15x15 puzzle, so that can add some replay time. However, with that greying out issue I mentioned, I'd rather play extra puzzles in one of the other many Picross games on Steam, so I doubt I'll revisit this.

So it's a decent little Picross game, but it could use a couple of improvements and more premade puzzles. But I'll still give it a thumbs up overall. But honestly, I'd only buy it if you've already played most of the other popular Picross games you can find on Steam.

Great little game that gives you exactly what you expect: A bunch of picross puzzles to solve. No silly story or annoying extra mechanics to try to make it it's own thing, just the pure game, which is exactly what I wanted. Nothing too hard in here, even the larger ones, but still fun to throw on a podcast and have something to do while listening.

I completed every puzzle in a little less than 30 hours, so it's definitely worth the full $7 price, not to mention there's a nice editor to create your own puzzles and plenty on the Workshop to download if you want to keep playing. And the best part about Picross games is you can come back in a couple of months or years and erase your progress and play them all over since you won't remember them, so I expect to get at least another 30 hours or so out of it sometime later.

I wish there was a neutral option. A pretty fun game, but even though the art style is definitely a choice, I still didn't really enjoy it, and the game is quite short, with only 12 cases to solve (which, yes, it tells you, but I thought they might be more involved or have more steps, but only the last few were complicated enough to last longer than a few minutes). Felt more worth $10 than the $16 I paid, but a few extra dollars isn't a huge deal, so still net positive.

I'm going back and forth on whether to recommend this, but in the end I'm going to say no mainly because of how short it was. I played through the whole game with no help, no looking things up, no hints, in a little more than 4 hours. I'm going to play through it a couple more times since I think I can probably do it in an hour or so to get the other ending achievements (another negative: there are 3 endings that give achievements, and there's no way to save and reload or anything to get them; you have to start over and replay this extremely linear game where you've already solved all the puzzles 3 times if you want them all, with all the plants you've identified reset. Really dumb), but I'm guessing I'll have 100%ed it in under 7 hours. And the gameplay in this is definitely not worth more than $2/hour to me.

EDIT: Quick addition now that I'm done to note that it actually ended up taking me about an hour to play through it again for a second ending, and I was able to reload a save once I saw how to get the third ending achievement (but I think the two more complicated ones are locked off so that you'd have to play at least twice, but I'm not sure). So my total time to 100% it over two playthroughs was just under 6 hours. Not worth $10.50 for me for that. END EDIT

The game itself is fine. That's it, fine. It's a bit dry and repetitive, but it also has a ton of atmosphere and it's satisfying watching your shelves fill up with named plants, so they even each other out a bit. The puzzles were pretty simple. It's mostly, "I need this plant that does this certain thing; do you have it?", then you looking in your book of plants until you see the plant that does that thing and then giving it to them. Except most of the time the actual plant you need to give to them is already told to you, so it's looking up that entry in the book and then figuring out which plant that is, which is very simple ("the plant has big waxy leafs," so you look at your plants, examine the couple with big leafs and give the person the one with the description that says "the leafs are waxy"). The other puzzles involve finding places on a map to "travel" to (in the form of a text description), which is a lot of scanning the map's tiny text for one name in the midst of many and then solving a simple puzzle.

Anyway, I would have liked this game a lot more if there was more to it, like it being more involved to find out what plants a person is requesting or if you had more to do in your shop other than "ring bell, talk to customer, give customer plant, repeat about 50 times." Or if it had been cheaper; $5 or $7.50 maybe would have felt better than even the $10.50 I paid on sale. Again, the creepy, cozy, mysterious atmosphere is great, but there's just not that much else there. I would love that atmosphere in a game where you did a bit more, whether that was more management of the shop or actually going out and exploring places to find plants. In the end, I think this will be something I'll forget about a week after I finish it and never play again rather than something I'd remember fondly and then revisit every once in a while.

While I'm going to keep playing this, I'm going to have to give it a negative rating. This commits the cardinal sin of logic games: It relies on guessing at times. In a lot of puzzles, there's no one spot where you can get started; you end up having to pick a spot to just make your best guess and start filling out the puzzle, finding out as you go whether it's all going to end up working out with all the numbers adding up correctly.

And that could be OK, if there were a bit more control over how you marked the puzzle, but literally all you can do is click to cycle through one, two or three dots in a hex. I'd really like to be able to lock in a hex that I know for sure is correct, or mark a hex as one that I'm just making an educated guess on so I know what to go back to as I get through the puzzle and find out that it was wrong. As the puzzles get larger and more complicated, it's hard to remember exactly which hex you should tweak to set off a chain reaction of you being able to go through the rest of the puzzle to fix it. It would also be nice if the puzzles got a little more complex than just add up the dots to make a number (which could also help with the having to guess).

In the end, I'm going to play through this while listening to a podcast or something since I got it in a bundle, but I wouldn't have bought it on it's own, and if I had, I wouldn't have been happy about it. It's only $3, so it's not like you're going to waste a ton of money by trying it, and it may be worth it to you, but it's just not really my style of puzzle.

EDIT: Just a quick update now that I've finished the game. It does get a bit more complex in later levels, which were the best levels, but it's still a bit underwhelming. It introduces some things like hexes that are connected to each other so that when you change one, all that color change, and some greater/lesser than and equals signs, but it only uses each mechanic on its own for a few puzzles and then abandons it for a new one, never combining all the mechanics. And it still suffers from a lack of being able to mark hexes.

I love Dead Cells overall, but I've been pretty annoyed with this DLC. I haven't even made it to the queen yet, because the new biomes are at the end of your run and you have to go through everything else first, so it takes a while, and the stupid minibosses before her are ridiculously tedious and annoying.

So, first, you start off with having to climb the lighthouse while fire rises behind you and the minibosses attack you. This is completely different from the playstyle of the rest of the game, of being able to go as fast or as slow as you want, being precise with your platforming. No, now you have a time limit and have to just keep moving and scrambling until you reach the main fight area.

Then the second issue is the minibosses themselves. They're not really hard, but they're incredibly tedious to kill because they move around so much. There are 3 of them: one is a slower moving one with large mace heads on ropes, basically morningstar flails. That one is easy to fight, because they actually stay in one place long enough for you to actually damage them. But the other two never sit still. One's an archer who jumps and teleports all around the arena, shooting at you from range, and the other is a sword person, who does many attacks where they dash across the screen to try to hit you. I've only put in a couple of runs to try to fight the queen, and each time I've easily killed the first miniboss and then sat there for a long time fighting the other two since it's so hard to get any real damage on them because they're constantly darting around the screen. Then finally I die to chip damage. And then I don't want to do the whole run and dumb lighthouse climb again, so I stop playing for a while. It feels way worse than any other fight or biome in the game, with me normally really enjoying the bosses no matter how difficult and having fun moving through the biomes. But this one is just annoying.

So honestly, unless you're just a completionist and really want to see every bit of the game, I'd pass on this one. Just continue playing the rest of the amazing game.

I heard about all the problems and complaints with this when it first launched, and I had no interest in playing it. But after jonsing for some more Fallout action, not really wanting to go back to 4, and seeing this on sale for $10, I thought I might as well try it out, especially since I had heard they fixed some of the major problems it originally had, like no NPCs and all. And I'm actually having a really good time.

I didn't really know what to expect going in, but it's a lot like any other Fallout game (well, since 3, of course). You're roaming the post-apocalyptic land, doing world-altering quests and random errands along the way, filling your pockets up with junk and leveling up as you go. It really feels to me like any other modern Fallout game, with some changes.

Leveling is done a little differently: You start with 1 in all your SPECIAL points rather than picking your stats from a set amount of points at the beginning, you get to put one point into a stat every time you level up (to a max level of 50), and they can all go up to 15 max (so you can only get a couple maxed out, depending on how you want to spread your points). And for every point in each stat, you can equip a corresponding value of perk cards under it, which it basically the perk tree from 4 but in card form. So if you have 4 strength, you might equip a carry capacity upgrade perk that costs 1, something that makes your armor weigh less for another 1, and an upgraded level 2 perk that increases your melee damage for another 2 points, for 4 total. It was a little confusing at first, because it doesn't really explain how that works, but it wasn't too hard to get a handle on, and I ended up liking this mechanic.

They also focus more on the survival aspect in this game, with you having to pay attention to hunger and thirst meters and eat and drink regularly if you don't want your carry capacity dropped. I didn't mind this at first, because it added a fun new challenge, but I very, very quickly got to a point where I had more food and drinks than I could ever use, so the challenge part fell away and it became just a chore of remembering to go to the food/drink tab whenever I opened my inventory. It could have been more interesting if they either leaned into it or made it optional, but it's in this middle area where food/drink is plentiful, so it's not hard, but it's annoying to have to constantly eat and drink since you'll be walking along and suddenly be overencumbered because you got too thirsty, making you stop and go into your inventory again.

The other differences come in to play with the live service aspect, and they're less good. You find way fewer caps in this game: I'm somewhere in the late 20s level-wise, having played for about 30 hours, and only have a few thousand, and things are expensive if you want to buy them from vendors. I haven't had any issue with needing to buy food, as mentioned, or ammo, but you need recipes and plans to craft anything not basic, and those are hundreds to thousands of caps (to be able to craft stimpacks, for example, it's 1200 for the recipe) unless you luck out and find it in the wild, which isn't going to happen (I have so many duplicate plans, none of them super interesting, because I keep finding the same ones). It also costs caps to fast travel; not a ton, but if you make a habit of fast traveling, you'll run out. You only find a couple caps here and there in the wild, making most by completing quests. You also have a limited inventory: You can carry as much as you want, if you don't mind being overencumbered, but your "stash" back at your camp, your box you can put all your extra stuff in and access from any other stash in the world, only holds up to 1200 pounds. I didn't realize that until later, so I quickly filled it up by saving one of every type of weapon I found, different types of armor, all these power armor pieces, etc., until I got a notification when I tried to add something saying it was full. Now I'm in a constant balancing act of having to police what I pick up. Of course, all of these changes are so that you spend money in the store (buy more caps, more carry capacity boosters, more camp slots so you can have more bases since you can fast travel to those for free, more designs and skins and emotes and everything).

I've also run into a few small issues with it being an online game, with it rubber banding very rarely or enemies running in place for a couple seconds before teleporting somewhere else, making it hard to shoot them. Small things like that. I haven't really cared or payed attention to other players; the only time I really see them is when I see someone else's camp is nearby, which means I can visit it to drop stuff off in my stash.

So overall, if you can ignore the ways it pushes you to the store (nothing too egregious) and want a new Fallout experience, I'd say give this a try, especially on sale. It's definitely worth the $10 for me; knowing what I know now, I might have paid up to $30 or so, but I wouldn't have tried that going in blind. It's regularly on sale for $10, so if you're interested, no reason not to try it out.

This game is fun. They streamline some of the gameplay from their other games like Dishonored, and the art, music and characters all come together to be a really good time. But, even though I'm giving it a positive rating, it still feels like it's missing something.

This world feels a lot smaller and less interesting than Dishonored's world. It feels like they relied too heavily on the time loop/repetition aspect and didn't put in enough stuff to do. And there's no real feeling of progression. Sure, you can collect residium to keep guns and perks between time loops, but other than that, you're not really getting more powerful or finding new gear, etc. You start with one of the most powerful tools in the game, the hacking tool that lets you turn all security measures against the enemies with 0 effort, making turrets and cameras a complete non-issue from the get-go, and you start with double jump. You do have to collect the other powers like Blink and Domino (or whatever they're called in this game), but really, Blink is what I used 90% of the time, with the telekinetic shove and domino (linking enemies together so that whatever happens to one happens to them all) making up the rest, but I used the other two just for fun. I didn't feel like I needed to use anything other than Blink and a silenced pistol the whole game, other than pulling out whatever big gun I was carrying for backup when Juliana invaded or I needed to fight another visionary.

Once you figure out each visionary's "thing," that's it. You've solved the game. Actually putting the plan into action feels almost unnecessary. In fact, that's where I'm at in my playthrough: I've gone through and figured out how to get all the visionaries in place to kill them all on one day ... but I have no motivation to do it. It will just be going through and repeating things I've already done, only all in one session rather than over a few while figuring it out. So I haven't played since I hit that point. I'll probably go back once enough time has passed that it feels fresher for me and finish it up.

It might seem like I'm just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (sorry, forgot how precious Steam was, "crapping") on the game even though I gave it thumbs up, and in a way, I am, but overall I still enjoyed this. I don't understand how so many outlets gave it 10/10s and such, though. It could use another area with another visionary or two to flesh it out, or multiple ways to set up each visionary for death in your "break the loop" run instead of just a single solution to the game's big puzzle. Both of those would have added a ton more complexity for the developers, sure, but it would have done a lot to help the game not feel so simple. Some more variance in the guns, a little more structure to make it feel like you're actually progressing in the game, and not making you so ridiculously powerful from the start all would have helped too. But the action is fun (the more gun focus in addition to the powers is a fun switch up from Dishonored), the characters and voice acting are good, the environments and music and style are great. Buy it on sale. It needs more to be worth full price.

This game is a big bait and switch. Don't expect what is shown in the screenshots and trailers for more than just a short part of the game. Everything about this game's advertisements show it as being a Slay The Spire-inspired deck builder roguelite, where you build your deck as you go through each run on a branching path, creating new and unique decks each run in a creepy, horror-themed setting, plus a bit of escape room thrown in outside of the card game. That's why I bought it. But that's only a third of the game, at best.

After the first act, the thing shown in all the screenshots and trailers, you are moved into the second act, which is a 2D, retro overworld map-based card collecting adventure game a la Pokemon Trading Card Game for the Gameboy Color. It's a complete shift of the game, tonally, graphically and mechanically. And honestly, it could be a game I'd be willing to check out, if I knew what I was going into and that was what I was buying. But going from this amazing setting dripping with detail and atmosphere to this bland old-school top-down map was a complete and utter disappointment. I went from being almost unable to stop playing, playing probably four hours in my first session, to almost immediately closing the game and not wanting to pick it back up. It's such a ridiculously huge letdown.

I'm not going to be one of the people calling it a scam, but it comes pretty close. The middle third of the game is absolutely nothing like the first third, and while the last third comes back a little closer to the first, it's still very different from anything shown on the store page or in trailers. The majority of the game is not at all what anyone would be expecting from looking at the advertisements for this game, and conveniently enough, the first part of the game lasted about four hours, for me at least, so it's well outside the refund range. I honestly probably would have refunded it once seeing that the entire reason I bought the game, you know, everything shown in the screenshots and trailers, was such a small part of it. But whoops! Guess not. Played too long.

And honestly, with the game being divided up into different sections like it is, each one doesn't feel fully developed. Each card game feels like the seeds of one, the basics that you learn before you then get into the meat of the game and start developing interesting strategies and facing tougher opponents. But then you're done, and everything changes.

Basically, even beyond my disappointment in the bait and switch, this game sacrificed everything, every part of itself, the atmosphere, the mechanics, all of it, in service of it's "twists" and "story." There's 0 replay value once you've been through it once, which is crazy for something labeling itself a deckbuilding game, and the sad part is, the story itself doesn't even feel worth it. It was interesting and fun, since I like that sort of stuff, the "real world intersecting with something that's supposed to be fake" trope, but it was simple, just wrapped in enough mystery that it seems like there might be something there until you get to the end.

This game would have been a thousand times better if it had stuck to what was in the first (and even last) part of the game, fleshing out the actual game part of it beyond the story and mystery. As it is, it went from a game that I would have happily played many, many hours of (I've played almost 70 hours of Slay The Spire) to something I 100%ed in under 13 (with a third to a half of that being just pushing through a section I had no interest in), left a bad taste in my mouth and that I will never play again, all for some bland "twists." I can see why some, even a lot of, people would like it and rate it highly, but I have no idea how it has an almost 97% positive score.